On the Agile Toolkit News site today there's a recent post looking at a specific part of several of the different PHP-based frameworks out there - the UI or view layer. He wonders why, with UI-specific PHP frameworks out there, why the two can't just play nice together.

I came over this old question on StackOverflow: "Which PHP Framework will get me to a usable UI the fastest?" I couldn't help but wonder, why people are not aware of all those other PHP UI frameworks? There are few, right? If you google for "php ui" you can find them. Those are more generally referred to as UI toolkits. But why those toolkits are not known in the mainstream?

He notes that most of the major frameworks leave you out to dry when it comes to presentation. They don't include much in the way of interface helpers in the name of modularity and backend focus. He suggests a few reasons why this happens and why the UI frameworks out there haven't made it to the mainstream. He gives three rules that could help this situation: view and object handling, giving developers a way to extend things easily and knowing the limitations of what the framework can do.